Tongue Twister

Alert your mother: Colin Firth was in town last week. The British actor best known for playing variations on the repressed-but-sexy English gentleman, such as the aloof Mr. Darcy in the BBC’s “Pride and Prejudice,” and the uptight, but still eligible, Mark Darcy, foil to the caddish Hugh Grant in “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” was staying at his favorite hotel, the Trump SoHo, and working the talk-show circuit. On Tuesday afternoon, he appeared in the lobby, wearing a black sweater and jeans, and displaying a jarringly un-brooding personality. “I’m not a big fan of hip hotels,” he said, explaining his choice of the Trump. “I prefer corporate—I hate to say that.”

Firth was promoting his new film, “The King’s Speech,” in which he plays King George VI, who ascended the British throne in 1936 after his brother, Edward VIII, abdicated in order to marry Wallis Simpson. Because of the weighty historical context (Britain on the eve of the Second World War) and the role (the story revolves around the King’s struggle to overcome a debilitating stammer, with the help of a speech therapist, played by Geoffrey Rush), it’s being discussed as Oscar material. This annoys Firth. The Academy Awards “could not have been further from our minds,” he said. “I thought we were making what could be a rather grim story of a man’s misery.” But he acknowledged that the monarch’s fear of public speaking could have broad appeal. “It’s an extremely heightened representation of anxieties that we all understand.”

He has one public-speaking horror story: “It was a punishment. I was eight. I was talking in class, and the teacher said, ‘Oh, do you want to give the lesson?’ ” The following week, after several sleepless nights, Firth was made to teach an hour-long class on the topic of soil. “It’s the only thing I ever really learned during my entire school years,” he said. “I still remember words like ‘loam’ and ‘subsoil,’ and different levels and layers. I brought in samples and little test tubes.”

This was in Hampshire, England. Firth’s father, a history professor, grew up in India, the fifth generation in a family of British colonists. He moved his family around, assuming teaching posts all over the world: Nigeria, St. Louis, and various places in England—“Billericay, Brentwood, Bath.” Firth downplayed the trauma of his peripatetic childhood compared with the trials endured by George VI, who was forced to wear leg braces and was abused by his nanny. But, he said, it gave him an appreciation for the importance of speech. As an eighth grader in Missouri, he was teased about his accent: “I kept hearing this expression ‘Pip pip cheerio!’ ” he said.

Walking down Spring Street, Firth arrived at Mercer Kitchen, where he surveyed a downstairs bar area, and said, “Amazing! iPads and iPods littering the landscape!” He opted for a table upstairs, where he ordered a Diet Coke and scallops, and talked about learning to speak like King George VI. “There’s no manual on how you achieve a stammer,” he said. “There’s a lot of work on how you overcome one.” Tom Hooper, the film’s director, urged Firth and the rest of the cast to work on their British accents, to make them historically accurate. “We spoke differently as a culture eighty years ago,” Firth said, then did an impression of a nineteen-thirties aristocrat “tapping his ‘R’s: ‘Tedibly, tedibly.’ ” The Royals had their own way of speaking. “If you listen to Edward VIII’s abdication speech, it’s got some very strange sounds,” he said. “Almost an American influence.” George VI clenched his jaw when he spoke, and Firth imitated his weak “R”s: “He would say, ‘Might is Llllright.’ ’’ The current Royals, Firth said, have an accent, too. “It’s actually, I think, rather particular to the aristocracy, perhaps even to just the Royal Family—” He stopped himself, and added, somewhat unconvincingly, “I can’t really imitate it.” (He said that he hadn’t been following the Kate Middleton story very closely: “I’m not part of that discussion.”)

Firth draped an arm over the banquette and suggested that the idea of the repressed Englishman is an outdated cultural stereotype. “It’s not as common in England as is perceived,” he said. “Certainly not in my generation. We grew up wanting to be Jimi Hendrix or Keith Richards—we didn’t grow up wanting to be a Conservative Member of Parliament.

“The English are very paradoxical people,” he went on. “It doesn’t take much to get them to let their hair down—soccer, alcohol, music, or general excitement.” Of the things that excite him, he said, food “is very high on the list. I cook Indian food. That’s a big pleasure of mine.” He added, “I’ve been forbidden it by my wife.”

Firth recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday. It fell on the day that “The King’s Speech” screened at the Toronto film festival. When Firth walked onstage, the audience started singing. “So I got a ‘Happy Birthday’ from two thousand people,” he said. “It made me blush.” ♦

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